RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework

Yifan Wang, Vera Demberg


Abstract
Despite significant advancements in natural language generation, controlling language models to produce texts with desired attributes remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce RSA-Control, a training-free controllable text generation framework grounded in pragmatics. RSA-Control directs the generation process by recursively reasoning between imaginary speakers and listeners, enhancing the likelihood that target attributes are correctly interpreted by listeners amidst distractors. Additionally, we introduce a self-adjustable rationality parameter, which allows for automatic adjustment of control strength based on context. Our experiments, conducted with two task types and two types of language models, demonstrate that RSA-Control achieves strong attribute control while maintaining language fluency and content consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/RSA-Control.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.318
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5561–5582
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.318/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.318
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yifan Wang and Vera Demberg. 2024. RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5561–5582, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework (Wang & Demberg, EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.318.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.318.software.zip